Project Description

Dr Gwyn Cole

Senior Attorney

Biography

Gwyn has many years of experience in patent drafting, prosecution, oppositions and appeals in his specialist areas of pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. This has been broadly based and includes neurologicals, anti-inflammatories, anti-cancer agents, cardiovascular medications, vaccines and antibodies for medical use.

In the pharmaceutical area, Gwyn has managed legal teams in several European Countries involved in infringement and revocation actions before the Courts and he is a former member of the Intellectual Property Committee of the UK’s Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association.

Gwyn previously set up the Intellectual Property Department of Smith & Nephew plc and headed Merck & Co Inc’s patent department in Europe where he was responsible for obtaining patents in Europe on what were then the world’s biggest selling pharmaceutics such as Zocor. In the last few years Gwyn has continued to work with potential blockbusters and has obtained the European patents on what are or will be major pharmaceuticals such as Lesinurad (to be marketed by AstraZeneca) and Ibrutinib (marketed by Janssen-Cilag) which is confidently expected to become the biggest selling pharmaceutical of all time (and formed the basis of the recent over €20 billion sale of its developer Pharmacyclics).

As a senior figure in the pharmaceutical industry, Gwyn was involved in some of the first SPCs in Europe including the lobbying process that led to the establishment of the European SPC system. He then obtained a series of SPCs on what were at the time Europe’s largest selling pharmaceuticals such as Simvastatin, Enalapril, Lisinopril, Ivermectin and Losartan. He obtained the first SPCs on combination products, for example on antihypertensive agents together with hydrochlorothiazide and pioneered obtaining multiple SPCs from a single patent. His activities in SPCs have continued to the present day and he has, within the last few months, managed filings throughout Europe of SPCs in respect of Ibrutinib, which will eventually add many billions of dollars in sales to the product.